John Ruskin Quotes
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A book worth reading is worth buying.
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There is nothing so great or so goodly in creation, but that it is a mean symbol of the gospel of Christ, and of the things He has prepared for them that love Him.
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It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
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When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.
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Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
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No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
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There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.
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For men to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes - this, nature bade not, - this, God blesses not, - this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.
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Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
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It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.
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The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
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A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
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The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
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A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.
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They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.
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Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
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Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.
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Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.
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I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
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One can't be angry when one looks at a penguin.
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Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.
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Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
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Give an earnest-hearted, devoted girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.
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A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.